Having trouble logging in? Password not accepted? Recently some bad apples caused a bit of a ruckus around here and a few accounts had to be reset.Please, drop Toshiba, Errol or n3wton a line and they'll sort you right out! We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause :(

how do I set up the coloration right in custom or "homemade" c1 textures so it wont go distorted?I tried to export a pix from carmagedit to edit. I use the carma pal file from tosh's c1 helpers.I edit the texture bmp then I press "indexed" using the carma pal file, it still messes up.

Are you working with Photoshop? When saving to BMP format, PS sometimes add annoying additional information in the header, which confuses Carmagedit.

Working in PS with the carma palettes should be straight forward really, you either use the palette from the get go and work as you would with any pixelart project, or you do your work in 32bit colors (be it from photos, paintovers etc) and then apply the palette at the end and see how it looks. You then save the bitmap file and either use Carmagedit to replace a pixelmap in an existing pixpack, or use TRixx to compile a custom pixpack (you aren't limited in pixelmap dimensions then). With my palettes (and QTZ'), pink always defines transparency.

Ok thanks, I use gimp. I will try other programs and see if they work better,What do you reccomend? I have a super old paintshop pro 9 in terms of texture creation, but I havent found it laying around lately...

Hello Everyone This is my first post here :) I put it here since it match the topic.

What's wrong when we are using default C1 palettes (used / build in in all available tools)?How to fix palette problem permanently?

When we exporting picture with palette where few index are lead to same color (blacks or whites there), then load exported image to image editor - all index which are point to identical colors are merged into lower one - in this case 0, so all same blacks (or white for menu) are become transparent (index 0 color is treat as transparent in C1). This depend on editor – if, and when the colors are merged, so in some tools we have chance to import (do not remap!) proper palette before we start editing the file - Toshiba-3 method (act or pal files), but in some editors this is not possible or it's already too late.

But even if for our editor this will save as from corrupting images, we must remember and import palette for every new exported-loaded file (even if there is no transparency used). If we forget to apply this palette, we may only see our picture how it's corrupted in game, or even not noticed there are some indexes changed (for “other” black, if we patched only color 0).

My first solution was to patch every exported file directly just after it was exported (before loading to editor), this method work fine (also for editor without “import palette” function), but we need to process every file, every time when we exporting it, also we need to remember which palette we are patching (race or menu), to use correct patch.

Many C1 modders/creators have this problem – I see it in custom pedestrians or textures and looking on C1 forums. So I started to think of making this process easier and have all the files proper from beginning.

First idea was to use “purple palette” with existing editor, but not all editors support external palettes, so I decided to build proper palettes directly to those tools, so this is how Purple Patch has been made. First version (included) was most based on DOS engine, but now thanks to Toshiba-3 report I have moved it to NSIS installer form, which working for most Windows systems (not tested, but should work on all from 95 to 8).

Edit: (duplicated black index is used not only in SP, but in C1 too)

I also discovered that many of C1 and SP images (most grid icons, rank font and probably flics) are using those two black indexes (“purple palettes” are included in some SP files [and came from there], but they probably started to use such "purple palettes" from very beginning, but not include those in game), so I also recommending to patch palettes used in game (C1, SP, MELD versions) to see one more black level (for menu palette). Patching in game palettes is also required for some tools.

Edit: "Purple palette" for menu is actually included in every version of Carmageddon in flics files. But some early flics have different palettes at all - most interesting from files I have tested so far, are quitcome.fli and quitaway.fli, there is menu background image (source?) which look much better than with regular menu palette used in game.

So now using patched tools and palettes we have proper exported (extracted) files with all unique colors “from factor” - no more unexpected “black holes” - and we don't need to import palettes at beginning of the process or patch anything anymore!

But this is not end - after file edition is done we need to have our file in 256 colors format with proper palette, so if we using editor (or specific editor function) which convert out picture to more colors format or we are do some tricks with palette, we need to apply (remap to) proper palette (with purple transparency and all unique colors) to our image and save it as 256 colors bitmap, before we import it back to our pix pack (or made new one with Trixx [Trixx during extraction process may delete all pix files on your HD!]). So here is the moment when we may need Toshiba-3 palettes (or our own exported from bitmap which was exported with proper “purple palette”).

For some tools we may use another method - for example for MS Paint we may paste our new picture on any other picture with proper palette and MS Paint will reduce and set colors automatically.

Toshiba-3 palettes are using different purple color than Stainless (and I), but this is not a problem, since the colors are very similar (duplicated black is fixed same way). I choice to use Stainless values - those are stronger than standard one (used by Toshiba-3). However I see on some Stainless images that red is turned unexpected to purple there, so we need to be careful and look at our output images closely.

When we starting to edit peds we usually exporting existing one using default tools like CarmagEdit in this example (all screens are taken from CarmagEdit):

Then we editing those pictures and import back (Mad Maxine work here), it's look OK...:

...But it's not, as we can see with patched CarmagEdit ("purple palette" build-in) - there are some black parts missing:

But, when at beginning we export images to edit from patched tool:

We avoid this problem and result is really OK:

This happened with most custom pedestrians (not only by Mad Maxine... by others too and even much worst than in this example) and some custom textures/sprites.

I hope this will convince you to use PP build in your tools . However you must be careful with red like colors (blood for example) to not make those transparent (as they do for some original peds in SP).